Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!mcdchg!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Imminent death of UUCP Zone predicted
Message-ID: <1990Jul16.200955.29906@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 16 Jul 90 20:09:55 GMT
References: <100@raysnec.UUCP> <269B82AE.415E@intercon.com> <707@logicon.com>
Organization: Chinet - Public Access UNIX
Lines: 31

In article <707@logicon.com> Makey@Logicon.COM (Jeff Makey) writes:
>>> 		site!...!site!user@knownsite (reach user by following this

>If "knownsite" receives such an address via SMTP, and can reasonably
>be expected to gateway UUCP mail traffic to the first "site" in the
>bang-path, then "knownsite" has no valid excuse for failing to deal
>with this properly.  Yes, there are plenty of UUCP-only sites that
>don't grok site!user@fqdn the way Internet sites are supposed to;
>that's why I always use pure bang-paths when sending mail via UUCP.

Yes, once upon a time you could predict what would happen when
you handed site!anything to a remote "rmail" program.  These
days, they may or may not take it upon themselves to interpret
the "anything" part.  Personally, I think that while such programs
are useful, they should not call themselves "rmail".
The next problem is that random sites on the path will prepend their
own names to the header address fields so that the sender's @ to !
inversion is not reversible, making replies impossible.

>It's a feature.  Internet sites are required to ignore the presence of
>bang-paths (and any other route encoding) in the local part of an
>address, except when the FQDN on the right-hand side of the address is
>that of the current host.

But, as you note, it's unpredictably difficult to present such an
address from a uucp site.  While many gateways may correctly deliver
path!domain!path!user, they don't all rewrite the headers correctly
and even if they do, intermediate sites may destroy them.

Les Mikesell
  les@chinet.chi.il.us